Christ before Pilate

In recent decades scholarly research has highlighted Giuseppe Vermiglio’s position as both a key figure in Lombard painting and one of the outstanding followers of Caravaggio in the early seventeenth century. Born in Piedmont, he moved to Rome at a young age, recorded as living in the city in 1604. His early known pictures reveal late Mannerist tendencies, which showed a familiarity with the work of Cavalier d’Arpino, but his style soon gave way to a more immediate and dramatic sense of naturalism. This shift was undoubtedly brought on by the influence of Caravaggio, whose presence in Rome had such far reaching impact on artists that came from far and wide. Vermiglio seems to have shared Caravaggio’s notorious reputation as a sometime incendiary figure while resident in Rome: he was arrested for carrying a sword without permission, and later accused of brawling with staff working for Cardinal Giovanni Dolfin near Palazzo Borghese. His apparently riotous behavior did not prevent his gaining significant commissions, including his first known public work, the Incredulity of Saint Thomas for the church of San Tommaso ai Cenci, dated 1612. He stayed in Rome until at least 1619, becoming a member of the Accademia di San Luca and living in the parish of San Lorenzo in Lucia, before being documented in Milan in 1621. His return north saw him receive numerous commissions from both individual patrons and religious orders, notably the Carthusians and the Canons Regular of the Lateran; for the latter he produced arguably his most ambitious cycle of pictures, for Santa Maria della Passione in Milan. For these major projects he often worked alongside Daniele Crespi, his pupil and collaborator.

Few artists in the seventeenth century demonstrated such an intimate knowledge of such a wide range of Caravaggio’s oeuvre; Vermiglio must have found a need to satisfy a high demand in the market for copies and variants of the former’s work. There are a considerable number of examples of him closely following and reinterpreting Caravaggio’s compositions, such as the Crowning of Thorns in the Palazzo Altieri in Rome, which pays homage to the former’s masterpiece, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

This canvas showing Christ before Pilate, in fine condition, is a splendid example of his reinterpretation of Caravaggesque subjects: with the half-length figures crowded dramatically in a dark space, it shows a clear debt to Caravaggio’s characteristic motifs, which can be seen most markedly in the Taking of Christ (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) made circa 1602.